Research papers, investigations, explainers, videos, laws and the organizations doing the work, from people who are alarmed and people who are skeptical. New additions are checked by two people before they are listed. The launch collection was compiled with the help of AI research assistants, and every link was opened and checked on 22 September 2026.
6 works on “How does AI actually work?” · Video · clear filters
An eight-minute animated explainer of what a large language model is: a program trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next word, then refined with human feedback into a chatbot.
Short animated explainer of how chatbots like ChatGPT work: a model trained on vast amounts of text that repeatedly predicts the next word.
A general-audience walk-through of how chatbots like ChatGPT are built, from internet text and pre-training to fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, and why they hallucinate.
Worth knowing: About three and a half hours long, split into chapters.
Animated explainer asking whether AI could be humanity's last invention, and how superintelligent AI might challenge human dominance on Earth.
An accessible explainer on why a model trained to imitate human text can state things that are false, and why getting AI to report what it really knows is an open research problem.
Worth knowing: Made in 2022, before today's reasoning models.
A 19-minute visual introduction to neural networks that uses handwritten-digit recognition to show how layers of simple numerical units, with adjustable weights, add up to a useful function.